Buffalo Woman Dies After Being Trapped Inside Car For 18 Hours During Blizzard

A 22-year-old woman was found dead in her car on Christmas Eve after sending a video to her parents of her trapped in her car during the recent blizzard.

Anndel Taylor was trapped in her car for 18 hours as the storm pounded upstate New York. She is one of at least 28 people killed in what Gov. Kathy Hochul has called “the blizzard of the century.”

Taylor got caught in the storm while driving home from work in Buffalo on Friday afternoon, the New York Post reported. She sent several videos to her sisters in North Carolina, with the last sent around midnight. That video showed her rolling down her car window to show a nearby van also stuck in the snow.

“She was telling my sister that she was scared,” one of Taylor’s sisters, Shawnequa Brown, told WSOC-TV.

“She called 911, and she was waiting for them,” her mom, Wanda Brown Steele, said. But “everybody that tried to get to her got stuck,” her sister Tomeshia Brown added.

“Fire department, police, everybody got stuck,” she said, which was questionable since New York is a “state that is known for snow.” Why didn’t emergency vehicles have the ability to operate throughout the monster storm?

Taylor had moved to Buffalo from Charlotte in 2021 to help care for her ailing father.

Taylor told her sisters that she would go to sleep and try walking to safety if help had not arrived when she woke up, her mom said.

The family said people were out trying to locate Taylor and had desperately alerted relatives in Buffalo to “go back out there again,” she told WSOC-TV.

“That’s when they busted open the window and seen that she was in there,” the grieving mom said.

“The car was running, and the snow was still coming, so it blocked the pipes, the exhaust pipe,” she said. “Then, after the car cut off, that’s when she iced up.”

It’s possible she died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

The family is working to get her body back to Charlotte. “We’re trying to get her here — because I want her here with me,” her mom said.